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New versions of aptosid and siduction continue Sidux legacy

The developers of aptosid, formerly Sidux, have released the latest version of their desktop-oriented Linux distribution. Released almost a year after the last version of the distribution, aptosid 2012-01 is code-named Θάνατος (Greek for "death"), includes many stabiliity improvements and is based on the 3.6 Linux kernel.

Shortly after that release, the developers of siduction, a distribution forked from aptosid to be more community-focused, announced its second release candidate of siduction 2012.2 "Riders on the Storm". The final release of the distribution will add the Razor-qt desktop environment for the first time to its range of desktops. Both distributions aim to provide a usable desktop Linux solution based on Debian Sid with a stable upgrade path.

With aptosid 2012-01, its developers have aimed to improve support for chipsets such as the newer Intel Ivy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer platforms. The new release also brings updates to its ext4 support and several new wireless drivers included in the 3.6 kernel. Drivers for webcams with the Topro chipset and several DVB capture cards are now available. The distribution can also now be booted with UEFI on hard drivers bigger than 2TB.

64- and 32-bit versions of aptosid 2012-01 are available from the distribution's mirror network. The aptosid wiki provides further information on how to installe the downloaded images and about the software included in the distribution.

The second release candidate of siduction 2012.2 provides four different desktop environments: KDE SC 4.8.4 with some backports from KDE 4.8.5, Xfce 4.10, LXDE 1.4.3 and now also Razor-qt 0.5.1. The codebase was forked from Debian Sid on 2 December and then adapted by the distribution's developers. They say that 109 bugs were fixed since the last stable release which is siduction 2012.1 from June.

Siduction 2012.2 RC2 can be downloaded from the siduction mirrors, the download directory is named "ridersonthestorm". Since this is a development release, it is not recommended for production use; users wishing to install a production system should install the current stable version 2012.1 from the "desperado-reloaded" directory.